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We need to change our animal kingdom metaphors when talking about Lynda Obst, the former New York Times Magazine editor turned Hollywood producer turned explanatory author.

In her 1996 best-seller Hello, He Lied, detailing her early years in the movie business (her films included Sleepless in Seattle, Flashdance and The Fisher King), Obst depicted herself and other women as lambs seeking to survive in a male-dominated industry of wolves.

Fond of making lists and cutesy descriptors (her “Ten Commandments for Chix in Flix” included the admonishment “Thou shalt not cry at work”), she was all motherly advice and sisterly concern.

Seventeen years later, plus many more movies (including Contact and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days) and TV series (Hot in Cleveland), a wiser and tougher Obst can now be more accurately described as one of the sharks in the Hollywood predator pool, although her bite is kinder and gentler. She admits upfront in her just-released new book Sleepless in Hollywood that she’s not writing a tell-all tome — nothing, in other words, like Julia Phillips’ riotous You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again.

Obst is a bit more gender inclusive this time, perhaps having learned the hard way that women in Hollywood (as in any business) can be every bit as rapacious as their male counterparts.

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While she’s full of admiration for high-profile femmes such as ex-Paramount Pictures CEO Sherry Lansing, her mentor and occasional antagonist during a stint at Paramount that rates its own long chapter, Obst also skewers two women she feels treated her poorly there. She coyly identifies them only as “The Blocker” and “The Hipster.”

What makes Sleepless in Hollywood erratically fascinating — there’s some dross and repetition in there — isn’t the gender stuff but rather the grander view of what’s wrong with Hollywood and its movie-making machinery.

Obst has issues with Tinseltown, and unlike her typically taciturn producer brethren, she’s not afraid to spill. She criticizes everything from gimmicky 3D to “sequel fatigue” to questionable co-production deals with China, a censorious country that demands artistic input in exchange for funding and access. (The makers of Brad Pitt-starring World War Z, for example, had to ditch a negative Chinese connection to the film’s zombie plague.)

Hollywood’s traditional way of making movies is rapidly changing, thanks to advancing digital technology and expanding global markets. Obst notes that even the classic story pitch meeting is all but gone, as many studio executives now prefer to get movie ideas not from producers, writers and directors, but rather from YouTube and other online outlets.

The whole filmmaking process has become more stressful, less rewarding and less fun, she says. Hence the “sleepless” angle for the book, which is subtitled “Tales from the New Abnormal in the Movie Business.”

By “New Abnormal,” another cute descriptor, Obst is pointing to how Hollywood has always been weird, although now it’s even weirder. (Old Hollywood ways are tediously referred to in the book as the “Old Abnormal.”)

“Sure, it was always show business, never show art,” Obst writes. “But now it is business business.”

Here are some of her observations about the “New Abnormal” that is today’s Hollywood, which help explain the current flood of dodgy sequels and superhero movies and why blockbusters like this year’s Iron Man 3 are going out of their way to include Chinese content:

“In the past 10 years or so, the studios have tried to patent a formula for surefire hits, and their product is filling your multiplex.”

“These huge tentpoles, $200-million-fueled missiles, are lined up on the studio distribution pads with their ‘must have’ famous names and launched like international thermonuclear devices toward foreign capitals where 3D is candy. International has come to be 70 per cent of our total revenues in the New Abnormal. When I began in the Old Abnormal it was 20 per cent.”

“I used to be able to buy a book that had sold under a million copies and adapt it to sell to studios just because it had a great story. No more.”

“Ten years ago we never knew the names of the heads of marketing; they were the guys in modest suits who came to previews. Now they are the other rock stars, along with the studio heads.”

“It became clear that not all comic-book heroes will do. A certain exhaustion is setting in.”

“The box office itself, despite some heavy breathing every weekend, has remained remarkably stable over time . . . The domestic audience is not abandoning the malls, at least not over summer . . . The domestic audience is volatile and unpredictable; they seek fresh ideas while the international market seeks familiar.”

“Special effects and 3D will not dazzle on their own merits forever; novelty wears out in the face of exposure to excellence. Sequels will just have to get better and cost less if they are to survive far into the future.”

Obst has some good news, too. She writes with pleasure about how sometimes the experts get it wrong. Bridesmaids, for example, looked like it was in trouble before it opened, as audience intention tracking was soft. But the movie far exceeded expectations and helped open doors for more female-driven comedies, such as this summer’s The Heat.

Obst has learned a lot in her time in Hollywood, and maybe become both less naïve and more cautious in the process. The book would have been a better read if she had been willing to risk losing a few friends and lunches.

But she’s still more candid than most producers and she retains a belief that Hollywood will figure out a way to keep the glittering lights on.

Her final words in Sleepless in Hollywood is to repeat the time-honoured question put by movie producers to hopeful film pitchers: “Whattya got?”

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